CHAPTER XIX

Bud had escaped. That was the meaning of the flickering lamp. And Roxie understood well the danger to Allston of standing exposed, after this, in a lighted room. Bud’s gun was here, to be sure, but he might have another hidden about the place--in the barn or the spring-house.

Allston had run into the hall and, finding his man gone, had promptly closed and locked the door through which he had escaped. The problem no longer was to keep Bud in, but to keep him out. Cursing his stupidity in not having maintained a closer watch, he struck a match in order to search both side rooms. Roxie, running to his side, warned him of the danger.

“He’ll shoot through the winder!” she cried.

This was a chance he had to take. Remembering his own ruse which had gained him admission in the first place, he did not care to see it repeated by another. He found both rooms empty. Bud had sought the open where he would be able to secure another gun and ammunition.

It was uncanny how in the space of less than a minute the whole situation had changed for all three of them. Roxie was quicker to realize this fact than Allston. She was quicker because for her the change meant more. Bud was now completely out of her power. As long as he had lain there in the hall, she was still in control of him. She had within herself the tribute price for Allston’s ransom. But with Bud gone this opportunity had been snatched away from her. She was left quite helpless--pitifully helpless.

And yet for a moment she felt as though suddenly soaring into the clouds like a released bird. If she had lost her power over Bud, he in turn had lost his power over her. For her this meant, for the time being, freedom--a wild, unnatural sort of freedom. She was a prisoner here with the man she loved. Their interests now, instead of being opposed, were mutual. Bud was against them both. And there was nothing she could do to prevent this; nothing Allston could do--until morning, anyway. They were as isolated as on a desert island.

Allston himself did not see this, at first, quite as clearly. He was for immediate action.

“We must get out of here quick!” he snapped.

“But we can’t,” she broke in eagerly. “He--he’ll kill us both. Bud’ll kill us both.”

“You forget I’ve got his gun.”

“You’ve gut _one_ gun.”

“It’s the only one he had.”

“In his pocket. But outside he mought have others, an’ long’s ye don’ know, it’s jest as bad.”

“But when you don’t know you always have a chance.”

“If he ain’t gut a gun, he’s gut sticks and stones. He’d kill with somethin’ afore yuh could git through the door.”

“There are two doors. He can’t watch them both.”

“Only yuh can’t tell which. An’ after what yuh done ter him--Oh, you don’ know Bud like I do.”

“I know he’s killing mad,” admitted Allston.

And yet, had it not been for Roxie, he would have taken his chance and made a dash for it. Once through the door it would be a fair fight. It maddened him--even as it had maddened Bud--to be held in check like this. He began to pace the room--keeping out of range of the glow from the dying fire.

Then a new thought flashed into his mind. If what this girl had told him was true--if she were really in love with Bud--then there would be no harm in leaving her here.

She was standing in the shadows over by the table. He strode to her side and she crowded close to him. She acted afraid, and that under the circumstances was not natural. She ought to be glad that her lover had escaped. And it made his own course obvious and simple. If he went out, Bud would come in and this would end the whole affair. A moment ago Roxie had refused absolutely to return with him. If that was her position before Bud escaped, it was still her position. Had he gone away and left her to free Bud--and he had seen no alternative--she would have been exactly where she would be if he went now. Bud had only forced by a few minutes the inevitable.

With only himself to consider, then, Allston did not propose to spend the rest of the night up here. It was both humiliating and unnecessary. It might easily turn out to be something worse. If he were not back at the Howe bungalow by morning, the house would be in a turmoil. With Roxie gone, too, his absence might be misinterpreted.

Here was a fair argument, and yet he was not altogether convinced that it would hold. It did not explain fully Roxie’s present attitude. Well, then his suggestion might force that explanation.

“Roxie,” he said quietly, “a moment ago you told me you came here because you wished to come.”

“Yes, sir,” she admitted with a start.

“You said you were going to stay.”

“Yes, sir, I ’lowed I was goin’ ter stay with Bud.”

“Did you mean that?”

Her senses were acute. She felt he was leading her into some sort of trap. She did not answer. Frantically she tried to guess the meaning of it.

“Were you telling the truth?” he demanded.

“Yes, sir,” she answered because she was forced to answer.

“It’s hard to believe--somehow,” he said. “And yet I don’t know why it should be. In time you were bound to marry, if not with Bud--then with some other Bud. Perhaps I’ve been thinking of you as younger than you are.”

“I’m eighteen,” she replied as a statement of fact.

“And that’s young or old according as you’ve lived. I saw men of eighteen in France who were fifty.”

“Yes, sir.”

“There are moments when you seem older than that and moments when you seem younger. That’s the trouble. What are you now?”

“I’m eighteen.”

“And you’re sure you know your own mind?”

“’Bout how I come to come up hyar with Bud?” she asked suspiciously.

“Yes.”

“Yes, sir, I know my own mind ’bout thet.”

“And about staying?”

“Yes, sir, I know my own mind ’bout stayin’. We--we gotter stay till mornin’ now.”

“We?” he frowned.

“Bud, he--he’ll kill us certain.”

He spoke more sharply. He was only going around in a circle and he was tired of circles.

“Listen, Roxie,” he said. “What you’ve told me about Bud changes everything. It’s evident enough now that I butted in where I don’t belong. If Bud loves you, and you love him, you’re safe enough here, and the quicker I get out the better. What I want you to do is to make what in the army we called a diversion. You stand out of danger and swing open the back door and I’ll cut out the front. Bud ought to be glad enough to see you to forgive your part in it.”

The girl cowered away. She did not speak. The silence became tense.

“That’s all there is to it,” he went on. “You’re game?”

Slowly the full irony of her fate made itself manifest to her. She did not know it as irony. It seemed to her more like some cruelly righteous form of retributive justice. The lie she had told to save the man she loved had been turned against her to threaten his life. She had lied to drive him out of this house away from Bud Childers and this same lie was still working to drive him out--but this time into the clutch of Bud. She did not believe for a moment that he had a chance to escape as he proposed. He did not know Bud. Even if he got through the door, he would not be allowed a hundred yards down the road. If he took to the woods, he would be a stranger there against Bud who knew every foot even by night. Bud would make sure and she could not stop him. The one and only chance she had of protecting Allston now was to keep him here until he was missed at home--until Miss Wilmer and Mr. Howe roused the village and sent out help to him.

She had lost her power over Bud by staying without a struggle with Allston. Her one opportunity for regaining her influence had been to send Allston away and release Bud with her own hands. That would have meant something to the man; it would have been a tangible proof of her friendliness that he could have understood. To bring about this opportunity she had deliberately sacrificed whatever good opinion of her Allston may have had. And now Bud, by escaping, had spoiled all those plans just as Allston, by coming, had spoiled all her other plans.

It was pitiful. She was stripped of her last vestige of influence over either man. And this at a time when she needed it most; when she had made each an even greater menace to the other.

That was because she had lied. It was wrong to lie. God hated a liar. His punishment was terrible and swift. She saw that now as vividly as though it were expressed in some flaming sign in the sky.

Trembling the girl clasped her two hands. She wanted to get down on her weak knees and pray for forgiveness.

“Why don’t you answer, Roxie?” Allston questioned sharply.

She did not answer because she felt as helpless as a mere onlooker; because she could no more think of what to say or do than a baby in arms before some awful catastrophe about to envelop her. She found herself repeating silently that little prayer which had been once before her last refuge this fearful night. The second line she said over and over again:

“I pray the Lord my soul to take. I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

That other time the steel-bladed knife which she had brought to the shack as protection against Bud was the answer to her prayer. And now the prayer--or a certain temporary poise resulting from reliance on it--furnished her with another solution. In reality this answer sounded more like the voice of God than had the other. If the suggestion was daring, it was the sort of daring of which the Lord might be supposed to approve. And it was both simple and logical like most of the acts of God.

Swiftly Roxie looked up and met Allston’s blue eyes. She could not in the shadows see much of them, but she felt them. They were steady and honest--of that she was sure. They were the sort of eyes that made it easier to tell the truth than to lie. And that was what the still, small voice advised. If she were being punished now for not having been honest, the only way she could redeem herself was from this moment on to tell the truth. God might not forgive altogether her first offense, but if the truth did not expiate it nothing would. No matter at what cost to her pride, to her instincts as a maiden, she must tell the truth.

“Speak,” he commanded.

So she spoke--her lips quivering.

“It--it ain’t Bud I love, it’s--it’s you,” she stammered.

“What?” he cried.

“It’s you,” she stumbled on. “Oh, it’s allers been you. I couldn’ help it. I’m sorry.”

Queer, feeble, jerky little sentences these through which to express as deep an emotion as that now shaking her--racking her. But they were the best she could do.

And feeble though they were, they struck home to Allston like knife-thrusts. He felt weak after them. For he believed--at least that she believed. This explained a dozen facts that had been vague; a dozen facts that he had allowed to remain vague even when they aroused his suspicions, because he in his turn had refused to face the truth. It was clear to him now why she had come here; it was because of this love, to save him. No other explanation was big enough to make plausible her willingness to risk her honor on this night alone with Bud. And all the incidents that followed fitted in accurately and convincingly.

Not for a second did Allston doubt her sincerity. And his big heart flamed up in response to the nobleness and heroism and idealism of the act--foolish as it was and as unworthy of it as he knew himself to be.

“God!” he breathed. “What a wonderful woman you are!”

“I couldn’ help it,” she moaned. “Bud--he said he’d kill yuh an’ he’d ’a’ done it too. An’ I thought--”

She looked so abject, so pitiful, so alone in her misery that Allston could no more refrain from what he did next than he could have refrained from picking up an outcast kitten mewing in the cold. He stepped nearer and gathered her into his arms. She came unresisting--weak from the continued tension of these last hours. She buried her face on his shoulder, trying hard at first to stifle her sobs, but finally letting herself go completely.

Allston held her tenderly and in silence. That seemed to be the only thing to do. Words were quite useless; reason, unavailing. Whether she was right or wrong or he right or wrong was not, in such a crisis, important. This was some isolated moment to be handled by itself.

If he could not respond with the deep emotion that stirred her, he felt his cheeks burning in answer to the clinging appeal of her warm arms, to the clean incense of her hair, to the feverish eagerness of her rapid breathing. He would have been either less or more than man had he remained insensible. Lightly he brushed her flaxen hair with his lips.

He felt as though he had been swept back a hundred years--a thousand, for all he knew; back to some time when the world was made up of nothing but stars and trees and men and women. This mountain shack of hewn logs might have been his own. And all he saw and all he knew was what it contained and what the forest roundabout contained. The rest of the world counted for no more than it did before the days of maps. Life must be lived and its problems, as far as they concerned him, settled right here.

Unconsciously his arms tightened about her lithe young body. In response she raised her flushed face a little--shyly, but with new confidence.

“You won’t go--now?” she whispered.

Her words startled him back to the present. His arms fell to his side.

“Now I _ought_ to go!” he cried.

A shattered pane of glass followed the report of a gun. Some one outside was beginning to probe the shadows.